Notice anything about the above image? It looks like a Facebook feed and five of the nine content pieces (only three are fully visible), are videos. The image is a screen capture from Goldman Sachs’ homepage – part of a modernization/ outreach effort under new Goldman CEO David Solomon.

Below we highlight several examples of companies that imaginatively use content. We focused on Websites as opposed to social media pages as many companies view their Website experience as an afterthought and doing so carries significant opportunity cost. Websites typically have less than 10 seconds to make an impression before users move on.

1.) Goldman Sachs: the company uses content to tell a story and to provide direct access to CEO David Solomon. Congrats to a company in an unsexy space deploying engaging content to its benefit.

2.) Red Bull: perhaps the best pound-for-pound content delivery company. RB homepage is video-driven, tells stories and mimics a social media feed while optimized for the mobile experience. https://www.redbull.com/us-en/

Key takeaways:

Engage visually – especially with video. Important both in terms of capturing viewers’ attention and also in terms of providing access to senior management. It’s up to you what video content you want to post publicly, although the world is becoming increasingly transparent. As CEO why wouldn’t you want to make time for regular, short-form video content that keeps employees (most important), customers (2nd most important), the Board, the community and investors informed about your current thinking?

I believe 100% that companies which communicate regularly with employees in a transparent manner are going to win the war for talent. Video is ideal for communicating in a scalable, global fashion. You should assume that video messages created for intracompany consumption will find their way outside of your company. Therefore, construct your message with this in mind. One transparent message for consumption by all is the best way to ensure consistency across audience cohorts.

Young users want to watch a short video, swipe right or left and engage through voice.

Google, Microsoft and Amazon have open-sourced their core machine-learning layers as well as basic AI-services, so it’s easy to deploy AI-powered voice assistants and to capture those front-end customer interactions in your machine learning layer.

Disruption Rarely Announces Its Arrival Ask Curtis Stevens – the gentleman who was knocked on his posterior by Gennady Golovkin in our header image – if he saw the punches coming. Ask former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer if back in the early 2000’s he knew SaaS/cloud-based service delivery models would dominate the software landscape. Ask…

It is true. Your CEO’s personality influences his/her ability to scale (among other things). It may seem self-evident. One’s intuition may suggest such a relationship between personality traits and workplace effectiveness. Well, it is more than a hunch. Published research demonstrates a relationship between CEO personality traits and company performance. Gow, Kaplan, Larcker and Zakolyukina…

Welcome to Apple Health

Apple recently announced that this spring it will release an update to its iOS for iPhones and iPads that will include a new “Health Records” feature that will provide access to personal medical records covering allergies, conditions, immunizations, lab results, medications, procedures and vitals. Given the ubiquity of the iPhone we believe that Apple is well-positioned to succeed where others – most notably Microsoft and Google – have failed. Listen to our recent podcast on the subject:

Tower of Babel

The Healthcare IT industry suffers from data fragmentation. Some healthcare providers store medical records using difficult to account for paper-based filing systems. Forward-thinking healthcare providers leverage Electronic Medical Records (“EMR”) which are an improvement over paper-based records yet are far from perfect. EMR products from different vendors don’t talk to one another and it’s common for different software versions from the same vendor to experience less than perfect communication. A lack of standards typically creates friction in any technology process and healthcare IT is no different.

EMR software is used by healthcare professionals at small, mid-sized and large medical practices/ healthcare providers to replace inefficient paper-based medical records. EMRs are required to store patient/consumer data in compliance with HIPAA.

How to Achieve EMR Nirvana

Step 1.) Universal Adoption of Secure EMRs: All electronic medical records are required to be stored in a secure-HIPAA-compliant format. This includes text-based, image-based and video-based health records. I considered breaking out “security” as its own “step” given that many CEOs and Boards are slow to address CyberSecurity (see our many CEORater Podcasts and TEK2day.com writings that cover CyberSecurity). No industry is more at risk of CyberBreaches than healthcare given the vast stores of sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (“PII”). We’ve frequently communicated about CyberSecurity and have been a vocal critic of Equifax and “sleepy” CEOs and Boards in the aftermath of Equifax’s 2017 CyberBreach (discovered in July 2017, disclosed in September 2017). I ultimately decided against breaking out CyberSecurity as a separate step given that it must become a way of life, embedded in every workflow, implicit in every operational process. That said, the EMR should become the single version of the truth replacing paper-based medical records.

Step 2.) EMRs On-Demand: EMR data elements must be searchable and readily accessible by any authorized person any time, anywhere in a HIPAA-compliant manner across platforms (zero friction goal). This is true both at the point of care and outside the point of care. One such example outside the point of care would be the application of advanced analytics across millions (if not billions) of anonymous personal medical records – only of course when patients/consumers elect to share their anonymous information. For example, if everyone who owns an iPhone volunteered certain anonymous health record elements to Apple it is not unreasonable to expect that Apple could move society steps closer to personalized healthcare by way of machine learning analytics at massive scale. For our money the world’s most valuable company over the next 100 years will be the company that cracks the code to personalized healthcare/medicine. But I digress..

Step 3.) Portability: EMRs must be portable. For example, if I take a job with a new employer that moves me from Dallas TX to Seattle WA a great deal of friction is eliminated from my move process if my complete EMR is readily accessible from one location that I control (iPhone).

M&A as a Catalyst

Apple could accelerate its Health initiative with one of several Healthcare IT acquisitions. We would focus on the EMR segment.Acquiring an EMR vendor would enable Apple to tightly integrate its Health App with EMRs to a greater degree than would be possible through EMR partnerships. Cerner and Epic are the leading EMR software vendors – each with a long history and vast domain expertise. Cerner recently recruited a new CEO – Brent Shafer – after the untimely passing of its former founder and CEO Neal Patterson. Epic continues to be led by its founder and CEO Judith Faulkner. Were we to advise Apple from an M&A perspective we would focus on Cerner (tkr: CERN) and Epic (private) with athenahealth (tkr: ATHN) as the alternate.

athenahealth: Boston-based athenahealth is led by its founder and CEO – Jonathan Bush – cousin to former President George W. Bush. Jon Bush is an entrepreneurial dynamo and in the event of an acquisition would be unlikely to stay beyond the negotiated earn-out period. In addition, ATHN has recently experienced senior-level turnover. Therefore, it would be essential that Apple gain comfort with the key senior leadership team members before executing an acquisition of athenahealth.

Epic: Judith Faulkner founded Epic in 1979 and doesn’t have to deal with the turnover that is typical in San Francisco, New York and Boston. The firm is culturally stable.

Cerner: enjoys similar cultural stability. New CEO Brent Shafer comes from Philips North America where he was CEO since February 2014. Co-founder and former interim CEO Cliff Illig remains a significant CERN shareholder.

CEO Profiles via CEORater.com

“Consumerization” of Healthcare

We believe that if the iPhone becomes the preferred EMR access point the patient/consumer will be empowered at the expense of:

Healthcare Providers:will have less customer lock-in as a result of portability/ reduced friction associated with changing providers. Many healthcare providers will gravitate toward transparency (i.e. publish pricing if they feel they are price competitive) in an effort to capture business. Major hospital systems are already losing share to neighborhood providers and urgent care centers. We expect this pressure on the large hospital systems to continue (see our earlier post on the healthcare industry).

Health Insurers: will continue to face economic pressure. The perverse government subsidization of various components of the healthcare system makes it impossible to have true price discovery and to establish a real healthcare market.

More Fodder for Apple Pay

Apple Pay and Apple Insurance? Should Apple Health effectively execute its strategy of becoming the preferred medical record access point it will be the connective tissue between consumers and healthcare providers. This will afford Apple the opportunity to monetize this symbiotic relationship by way of facilitating payments and/or offering its own brand of healthcare insurance – perhaps offering pay-as-you-go and peer-to-peer insurance models. Time will tell.

Healthcare IT Vendors

Partial List of Healthcare IT vendors sorted by Run Rate revenue. The “Run Rate” figure for each company was derived by multiplying the “Most Recent Reported Q” or “MRRQ” revenue figure for each company by “4” unless otherwise noted. For example, GE’s MRRQ revenue figure of $5,402 x 4 = Run Rate revenue of $21,608. Note that rounding may impact certain of the Run Rate revenue figures.

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AT&T Ought to Be Allowed to Acquire Time Warner “As Is” AT&T (T) ought to be allowed to acquire Time Warner (TWX) “as is” (earlier today AT&T extended the deal close deadline to April 22 2018). It is puzzling why the Justice Department would push back on the deal. We recently covered the topic in…

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Autonomous Teaser, Uber Data Breach, More M&A

In this edition of the CEORater Podcast we cover:

1.) Autonomous driving teaser..

2.) Perhaps Microsoft (MSFT) ought to acquire Anaplan and other SaaS/cloud Financial Management tools to create an upgrade glide path for Excel? We think so. Infor would do well to follow a similar M&A path.

3.) Uber the latest company to suffer a publicized data breach. We sound like a broken record regarding the subject of Cybersecurity.

4.) Meg Whitman steps down at HPE. IT Services and Technology-Enabled Services companies would be wise to acquire Enterprise Software companies. Such acquisitions would be margin accretive, EPS accretive, would bolster valuations and perhaps most importantly would begin to move the Services vendors out of the commodity services space and into a sector where they would own IP.